We present a theory of contracts. Contracts are interacting processes with an explicit notion of obligations and objectives. We model processes and their obligations as event structures. We define a general notion of agreement, by interpreting contracts as multi-player concurrent games. A participant agrees on a contract if she has a strategy to reach her objectives (or make another participant chargeable for a violation), whatever the moves of her adversaries. We then tackle the problem of protection. A participant is protected by a contract when she has a strategy to defend herself in all possible contexts, even in those where she has not reached an agreement. We show that, in a relevant class of contracts, agreements and protection mutually exclude each other. We then propose a novel formalism for modelling contractual obligations: event structures with circular causality. Using this model, we show how to construct contracts which guarantee both agreements and protection. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.
CITATION STYLE
Bartoletti, M., Cimoli, T., & Zunino, R. (2013). A theory of agreements and protection. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) (Vol. 7796 LNCS, pp. 186–205). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36830-1_10
Mendeley helps you to discover research relevant for your work.